Growing up, I always found the last week of summer to be a bittersweet experience. I relished the freedom, yet felt terrified about the new school year ahead. I’d start to build up an overwhelming amount of anxiety that would travel with me into the classroom.

I grew up in a place where, at a very early age, girls are encouraged to be “girly” and boys are encouraged to be “manly”. Like, cartoonishly so.

I was too shy and socially-disoriented to really make it happen. Early on in life, I was pretty scared of people…I couldn’t make sense of them; I just saw people as these vague, menacing specters. As a result, I needed a lot of down time. I just wanted to be alone, reading, hiding away.

In 2005, at the age of 30, I began therapy and received a diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome (now Autism Spectrum Disorder). It caught me off guard, because I had gone in specifically to receive help with depression and social anxiety. A spectrum diagnosis was not on my radar, and it took me over a year to fully come to terms with the reality of it.

Serena McCarroll first began to experience chronic pain during her training at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School. She would later develop additional challenges with proprioception, the body’s ability to continually sense and integrate its movement and position.

During college, I had an easier time making friends with students from other countries than with my own US classmates. We seemed to share a confusion with the surrounding social world, although for presumably different reasons.

(Part 1 of 2)

This is a collection of stories about a friend I made during college. I can count on one hand the number of friends I’ve made in my life- it has never been an easy thing- so experiences like this stand out in my mind.